Conan O’Brien’s commencement speech at Dartmouth is excellent, humorous, and heartfelt, check it out!
“It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It’s not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can be a catalyst for profound re-invention.” (via dumplingboy)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELC_e2QBQMk&w=560&h=349]How many hours a week do you spend in meetings? Some people spend 20-30 hours a week, some even up to 40 hours/wk. Meetings take time and time is money. There are meetings that waste time and meetings that inspire people.
So, how can we make meetings not only more efficient but more effective?
A meeting is a process of communication that leads to result that begins before group assembles and commends after group dispenses. I now facilitate leadership and organizational effectiveness sessions for groups. Here are 7 inside tips (contact me if you are interested in more):
1) You have a responsibility and right to good meetings. If you a run meeting, you have a responsibility to make the meeting successful. Make sure you hear ideas that others would not have heard. Try to build off of others, use the “yes and” approach.
2) Effective meetings: An efficient meeting starts and ends on time and follows an agenda, but we never even know if real “work” got done. An effective meeting does something for organizations and balances being creative and having structure.
3) Roles: Understand the roles that you like to play and others like to play in a meeting. Roles in groups are really important: there is often a joker, cynic, dreamer, provocateur, delegator, leader, evocateur. My personal favorite: the evocateur, that is the person who is listening to the group!
4) Presencing: Be present. This is more than a physical location, a group must be mindful to what is being sensed in a meeting. Structure agendas where groups work 2 by 2’s, engage people, make them move around.
5) Update meeting agendas: Realize what the key topics are during the meeting. Create a schedule and adjust the agenda by topic rather than just having a round robin of updates.
6) Save the meeting: You can save a meeting even if you are not in charge. How? Acknowledge an issue, ask questions, summarize points, refocus an agenda, regulate to get dissention and agreement.
7) Evaluate: Do an evaluation at the end, a check-out or pluses and deltas. What went well? What could have gone better? Add the date and look at this before the next meeting.
Throughout our childhood, we learned through imitation, we copied from our elders and turned this into our own voice. Most of these traits were borrowed from our culture and family fields of expertise. Now, it is easy to feel ashamed that we are copying someone else. People are made to feel like don’t have agency when the act of learning can be a form of agency.
Proud people are proud of what they’ve learned. In graduate school, I am surrounded by the frontier of knowledge and oftentimes feel incompetent and unknowing. School provides me a safe environment to feel this way and encourages living in uncertainty.
Yet while in school, I am not just paying attention to what I’m learning, but also to my histories back home. I may still feel ashamed of what I’m learning, especially if it is not legitimate within my culture.
If I go back to people I use to talk to before grad school, they may give me positive reinforcement and think it is wonderful I learned what a “cost/benefit” analysis is. If I took my job offer at Deloitte afterwards, this would mean I was a grad school success.
If I say I am uncertain about my future career, they’ll think I’m crazy or have become seduced by the bubble of my school. It is easy to feel ashamed of what I’m learning.
Our challenge in school is to learn new ways of thinking but to keep asking ourselves: how can I translate this into my own language and poetry, with my own ways of analyzing the world?
I can always go back to the same business suits that I’ve worn, I know it’s comfortable, I know how it fits, people expect me to look that way. I’ll be accepted. I risk this when I try and test new ways of thinking and operating, but that is the whole point of coming to school. I’m proud of what I’ve learned.
In that first
hardly noticed
moment
to which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the new day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.
What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.
What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.
To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.
To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.
You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.
Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love? What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?
~ David Whyte ~
Through all my social impact work over the past 5 years, whether in the education, food, health, or sustainability sector, the common thread I have seen is a need for (1) a more systemic, cross-institutional way of thinking in order to address the fundamental root problems in these systems and (2) local and decentralized leadership capacity that allows leaders to identify potential for innovation, and to act on it. There is a lack of leadership capacity on the ground to work across sectors. I have learned that we cannot address the challenges just by focusing on one sector. What is required is the capacity to collaborate across sectors, and to create projects and innovations that focus on multi-sector innovation capacity.
Through a course called “Leading in a Profound Sustainable World” at MIT in fall 2010, I was introduced to the Presencing Institute and became immediately inspired and interested in their work on ecosystem change to address the world’s largest social problems.
The Presencing Institute (PI) is a global network of change makers that seek to initiate profound societal innovation and change. PI focuses on advancing social technologies and leadership skills, and making them available to change makers, innovators, and communities around the world to address the root causes of the current economic, ecological, social, and spiritual crisis. Over the past 5 years, PI has created a global network of advanced practitioners, and built cross-sector innovation processes that address social and environmental challenges in, among others, major global companies (Nissan, BASF, BP,Shell) NGOs (WWF, Oxfam, Red Cross) and multi-lateral organizations (GIZ, UN). PI also aims at creating local platforms that connect change makers and leverage their work.
This year, the Presencing Institute launched a new project to create a shared cross-institutional learning and leadership platform—and a network of places—that allows for learning and capacity-building across institutional boundaries. This innovation and leadership platform called g.school aims at creating a globally networked and regionally grounded innovation ecology that consistently generates the following five types of outcomes:
1. Vibrant Living Prototypes
2. Leadership Capacity Building for local change makers
3. Cross-Institutional Platforms for Innovation
4. Knowledge Tools for Change Makers
5. Core Group of Reflective Practitioners and Thought Leaders
My summer internship working on the g.school project with PI is a perfect synergy of my intellectual interests and my passion to help addressing the social and environmental challenges especially in non-industrialized countries. I am already intrigued by the emergence of a powerful network of such leaders and their institutions. My goal is that my work for PI will also leverage the earlier work I have done especially in India. Looking forward to more updates here in the coming weeks!
Sheryl Sandberg’s words from her Barnard commencement speech have been echoed again and again across blogs and media over the past month. Her heartfelt message for young women is to lean in, not lean back, put your foot on the gas pedal, and own your career.
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